Spring Break 2013

Well hey there everyone! It's been forever since I wrote. Sorry about that, I have been so preoccupied with school and other things. Anyways, I'm on Spring Break and I went to Indian Wells over by Palm Springs and got back on Thursday.

My grandparents and I stayed at a Hyatt that was absolutely huge; there were multiple pools, a tennis court, a golf course, and even an area where you are able to play ping pong or volleyball. Yes, the setting was nice, but the best part of my time there was the friends that I made. The first day there I met Nate.

We are the same age and we both have many similar interests... (girls :p) That day, together, we hung out with a group of some girls that ended up being total duds. The next day, we searched for people with whom we could hang out (just recently found out that you are not supposed to end a sentence with a preposition). We found pretty much no one. So the next day we were determined to find someone.

But before that, I did something stupid... I put his phone in the water because I was completely sure that  it was water proof... (it was a Samsung Galaxy s III.) I was wrong. At first his phone was alright but soon after the screen stopped working. I am never doing anything like that again.

We approached a group of girls ( of course...) that were playing volleyball and asked if they minded if we played too. We all played together and had a great time. The main girl (in other words the one that I liked best) was Sally. She was really pretty and cool. We hung out for the rest of the day. It all went well until that night when we got back from dinner and tried to meet up with her and her friends. First, we couldn't find them right away, second, when we did they said that they had to go back to their room and that they were leaving at 6 o' clock the next morning. I never even got to say bye to them properly, but they were just a small part of the great time I had with Nate.

Summercamps before High School

Hey everyone, sorry for not having posted in pretty much forever. I had quite a bit of stuff to do this summer and now I just started High School two weeks ago. Over the summer I went to two summer camps and a missions trip to Arizona. The first camp I went to was a house boats trip at Lake Shasta with one of my church high school groups. We did ski runs every day so I got to go WakeBoarding!!!!!!!! I love going wake boarding I am pretty good at it and it's so fun!!

Here are some other pictures from the trip:

It was a great trip and I made one really good friend. Her name is Katie. For some reason I didnt get any pictures of her while we were there, which made me really frustrated cuz I dont see her that much anymore.

The second camp was with my other church high school group and we went up to Hume Lake. It was so cool. One of the days there, it was Super Spirit Day!!! We had to dress up according to the theme, which was USA. What we did was we had me dress up as President Obama and all the other guys in our group like the Secret Service. We pretty much won the competition and we got full spirit points for that day.

It was the coolest day by far up there. I also made another really good friend up there. Her name is Aley. Unfortunately I got a total of two pictures at Hume because I forgot to charge the camera battery after I got back from Houseboats.

Next I went on a missions trip to the Navajo reservation in Arizona. My team was from the same church high school group that went to Hume. It was such a great experience and now I get to go to Jamaica next year to do the same thing. Here are some pictures:

The Painted Desert was full of different colors of sand and stone.

Amazing view of The Grand Canyon.

Leah and my best friend Gavin. (Gavin tried to make it look like he was jumping off into the Grand Canyon).

This is what I found when we walked into our Hotel room.

Elk just outside of the Grand Canyon.

Our group at the Painted Desert.

Me at the Painted Desert.

My friend Sam at the Painted Desert.

Being able to do all these things was really cool. I cant wait to do more next summer!!!!

See you all next time.

YOSEMITE

Over spring break, I went up to Northern California. During that time I went to Yosemite. Although Yosemite might not be the most exotic of places, it was still really cool and beautiful. The mountains were huge. I was awestruck and I felt so small when I looked up at them. Especially half dome; it was so tall and I felt so useless looking up at it. 

The waterfalls are really cool too. There were several different ones. Some were really small, and others were huge. Yosemite Falls was either the biggest or one of them. It had three parts to it, the upper, the middle and the lower.

The biggest one was the upper, the smallest one was the middle, and the medium-sized one was the lower. The nature there was one of the things that makes you say, "how in the world did God make all of this in just anew days?"

We went on a couple little hikes and we took a bus tour around the park. Our guide was great. He knew what he was talking about and used what he knew to make the tour more interesting. 

The lodge we stayed at was called Yosemite Lodge. It was a pretty big place. They even had a place where you could rent bikes. I rented a bike and rode it around for a while we went to go watch people rock climb up the cliffs. While I was riding my bike it started to snow. That was the first time I was ever in a place where it was snowing for more than an hour. It didn't stay on the ground though, the weather was not cold enough for that.

One of the nights, we went out to dinner at the Ahwanee Hotel. The food was really good and the view was amazing, especially since it was snowing. We wanted to stay there but it cost too much so we didn't. The hotel itself is like a hundred years old.

Here are some of the pictures we took while we were there.

 Thats it for now. I will be posting later this month or early in the next.

Amboseli day two

Amboseli was the last place we went to. Our second and third days were a little bit different than the first. Early in the morning the second day my GRANDPA/DAD and I went on a nature walk with a couple Masai men who knew their stuff about the area they live in. I learned many interesting things and saw some really cool stuff, for example:

we learned that Dik diks, on right, leave a little black thick fluid that comes from their eyes on different plants, or something like that, to mark their territory.
Here is one doing what I just explained they do.

We also saw some footprints of Aardvarks, porcupines, and elephants. We also heard some really cool bird sounds and looked at different spider's webs.

Later that day we went on an all day game drive where we stopped for lunch later on at the top of a hill. We drove around looking for things when we saw a big group of elephants with hyenas hanging around them.

They kept creeping up to the elephants, but the elephants chased them away. It turned out that there was a dead hippo behind the elephants that the hyenas wanted to get to. The elephants chased them away because they thought that the hyenas were going after them. We sat there watching for who knows how long. When nothing else happened for a while, we eventually got bored and left.

A little while later we saw hundreds of more elephants in the distance. It was just a huge line of them that never seemed to end.

Driving along some more we happened to come by a couple of ragged looking lionesses looking for water and food. They looked like they were exhausted and could not go on much longer. I had to feel sorry for them, they looked like they hadn't eaten in years.
They did not do very much, but since we had the best seat in the house, meaning we were the closest to them, we stayed and watched for a while.


We headed off to lunch and on the way we saw some hippos and elephants in the swamp water. On top of the little hill we were eating lunch on, we could see birds flying in the distance, hippos in the water, and some little sandstorms in the distance. After I was done eating I still had some leftover bread from the sandwich that I had so I was able to feed the birds around me. There was one that liked me and was brave enough to eat right out of my hand. It was cool because, one, I love birds, and two, they are wild birds not pets or ones from a zoo or something.
After that we started to head back to the lodge. We drove by a pond with storks and spoon bills in it.

Awww, isn't that cute. Those are spoon bills, the one behind them is a stork.

That is it for now everyone, I might not be writing for a while because school is starting tomorrow.
see ya

Lake Nakuru

We did not do anything the first day because we had to drive all the way to the lodge, the most long and boring trip ever. When we got there we had lunch, but shortly after that we went to the room. It was so cool, there was netting on the  beds and the room was filled with all sorts of bright colors.

It rained all the rest of the day so we did not do anything special, so... off to the next day.

The next and last day at Lake Nakuru was the day we went on a drive in the national reserve, which is known for the tons and tons of Flamingos in the lake. As we drove in we saw several baboons, they were so funny to watch because, unlike the other animals, they did not know to get out of the  way of the vehicle. I was worried that we were going to run over one of them, but we didn't thankfully.

All together that day we saw:

• hundreds of baboons with their little ones playing on some tree roots
• Storks 
• spoon bills
• Rhinos
• all sorts of gazelles and antelopes 
• hippos
• hyenas
• elephants 
• giraffes 
• lions in trees  

• and more...

that is all so I will talk to you people later.

The Maasai Mara part 2

The second day in the Mara we did a full day game drive. We went out at 8 o'clock in the morning. We started off by seeing several Zebras right when we came out of the camp. We did not see much at the beginning of the day, but we did see all of the animals that usually take part in the great migration, they just stood around. It was amazing how well they got along together. It was cool to see so many animals in peace with each other. I had never seen so many animals all together at once in one simple place.

We drove off to somewhere else to find what we could. We went a little while without seeing anything different, then our guide spotted some lions a little ways away. When we got there we stopped for a while. It turned out we were really lucky, the lions were mating. it was interesting to watch. The female would go over to the male, the male would get up, get on the female and they would "go" for about fifteen seconds.

The lions kept it up for a long time, it seemed like it anyway. A little bit later we left the lions and headed out to look for something else that could be interesting.

We were driving along when Nixon, our guide, spotted Zebras over by a river a while away. When we got there there were thousands of Zebras lined up near the river. Since we were there for the Great Migration, the Zebras were deciding if they wanted to cross the river to the other side or not.

They ended up not crossing, but it looked like they were going to a couple of times. What they would do was get real close to the water, get a drink, then they would go back to where the rest of the herd was. One of the reasons they did not cross was because of the 3 Crocodiles that were nearby just waiting for the Zebras to start crossing so they could get a good and tasty meal.

Once we decided they were not going to cross, we left so we could find a place to get out and have lunch. We stopped near a river with Hippos in it.
The cool thing about the lunch was that it was out in the middle of nowhere, the bush, where any animal could pop out of the bushes or something.

After lunch we left. We did not see anything more that is worth telling about, so I will talk about The Maasai Mara part 3 next time.

Kenya

Hi everyone sorry I have not written in so long I was busy with stuff I needed to do and plus, I got to go to Kenya for 2 weeks and it was fun and even more amazing than you can imagine. We first went to a place called Samburu which was a in a tropical sort of place which had monkeys and a few antelope called Kudu that came around every once and a while. I kept a journal so I wouldn't forget about everything. All the animals are:

• Wildebeast all over in the Masai Mara because of the great migration
• Zebras same thing as the wildebeast
• Giraffes
• baboons
• Rhinos
• Chimps
• Elands
• Topis
• Elephants
• buffalo
• monkeys
• dik diks
• impalas
• thomsan's gazelles
• grants gazelles
• hippos
• crocodiles
• vultures
• eagles
• secretary bird
• ostriches
• cheetahs
• lions
• hyenas
• mongoose
• jackals
• hartebeast
• oryx
• maribou
• warthogs
• storks
• spoon bills
• and much more

and many birds that were beautiful in color and that we saw many times so we could appreciate how pretty they were.

 This is Wafula--does he look familiar? I was given an African tribal name by a Kenyan man I met. It means Rainy Season which is a good time for Africa. It is a time when everything grows and animals are nourished.

This is only the intro to everything. My next blog entry will be about the first days in Samburu National Reserve.

It's Time

Guess what everybody--it's tomorrow. We're leaving for Italy tomorrow.

First we're going to fly to San Francisco. Then we fly to Frankfurt on a 747 like we did last time. I love the 745 because you lay completely flat when you want to sleep. And each seat a big TV screen that you can play video games on and watch TV. I'm going to be upstairs in business class. That's where I was last time. And also last time I was facing backwards. The plane was going forward but my back was facing that way. My papa has a lot of frequent flyer miles. That's why we get to go business class.

These is a picture of me sleeping and a picture of the TV screen.

I'll give pictures of this time, too.

From Frankfurt I fly to Nice, France. In France we're going to see our friends there for the first couple days. Then we're going to go to Arles and that's where I will be on my birthday. I'm going to be 13--psych--11.

And then, finally, we drive to Italy but we go to Bologna for two days. Then we go to Sant Antonio for a week. And then, FINALLY, we're going to Greve where all my friends are. I'm anxious to see my good friend and sister, Camilla

Well, gotta go.

Bye

San Francisco

For Thanksgiving I went to San Francisco with my grandparents and my Uncle Jeff. He's really cool. We had fun. I saw a gorilla that wasn't real but it seemed real because it bonked its chest and roared. These pictures were taken there at Rainbow Cafe. My Uncle Jeff bought me a real panther there that I named Panthy--just joking, it was just a stuffed animal

This is Uncle Jeff and Me.

This is a gorilla and my grandma.

Here I am playing an old fashion baseball game. It was in a building near Fishermans Wharf. There were all sorts of old fashioned games there. There was an arm wrestling one that nearly broke my arm.

• 

Here I am waiting for the cable car to come. It was cool except for the part where we had to slow down going down hills.

Here we are on the cable car. We were getting on the cable car here down by Fisherman's Wharf which was near Pier 39. This is me, Uncle Jeff and my papa, who's only 40 years old. That's funny because Uncle Jeff is 37.

Here's a video of the cable car turning around. It's turning around on a round table. Strong men had to turn around the cable car and push it off the round table.

One of the interesting thing that we did in San Francisco was that Uncle Jeff and I went on a submarine that was used in WWII. We got to go inside of it and see torpedoes. I thought it was really, really cool. It would be hard to live underwater for a long time with a teeny, teeny bathroom and a desk that can't fit two people in the room. Every time you tried to get up you would hit your head on the cot above you.

Which three are the monkeys? I'll give you a clue--the first one, the second one and the third one. I'm number 4.

This is the Golden Gate Bridge but it's not as big as the Bay Bridge. We passed right by Treasure Island.

See you in 5 years--just kidding? See you soon--ciao, ciao.